Bodies are hidden. The spotlight from the balcony begins to throw a series of colors. Melody is lost. The jazz band is hammering like a mad blacksmith. Whang! Bam! Whang! Bam! Nobody hears the music of the band. Bodies together move on the turnstile floor. This is the part of the feast of Belshazzar that the authorities censored in a Griffith movie. This is the description of Tiberius's court that the authorities suppressed. Here are the poems that hide on the forbidden shelves of the public library. The pulp of figures dissolves. The hammering band has finished. Men and women, grown suddenly polite and social, return to their tables. Citizens of a neighborhood, toilers, clerks, fourflushers, wives, husbands, gropers, nobodies, less-than-nobodies--watch and see where they go. Into the brick holes, into the apartment buildings. They pack themselves away like ants in an anthill. The nobodies--the gropers, husbands, wage-earners, fourflushers--but they made a violent picture a moment ago. Under the revolving colors of the floodlight and the hammering, whinnying music of the jazz band they became again the mask of Dionysus--the ancient satanical mask which nature slips over her head when in quest of diversion. NIGHT DIARY Where is the moon? Gone. This inferior luminary cannot compete with the corset ad signs and the ice cream ad signs that blaze in the night sky. We stand on a bridge that connects State Street and look at the river. There are night shapes. But first we see the dark water of the river and silver, gold and ruby reflections of the bridge lights. These hang like carnival ribbons in the water. The "L" trains crawl over the Wells Street bridge and the water below them becomes alive with a moving silver image. For a moment the reflection of the "L" trains in the river seems like a ghostly waterfall. Then it changes and becomes something else. What? The light reflections in the dark water are baffling. It is a game to stand on the bridge and make up similes about them. They look like this, like that, like something else. Like golden pillars, like Chinese writing, like monotonous exclamation points. There are boat shapes. The river docks bulge with shadows. The boat shapes emerge slowly from the shadows. These shapes, unlike the river reflections, do not suggest similes. They bulge in the darkness and their vanished outlines remind one of something. What? Of boats, of ships, of men. Men and ships. Little lanterns hang like elfin watchmen from the sterns of ships. The bulldog noses of tugboats sleep against the docks. High overhead the corset ad and the ice cream ad blaze, wink and go out and turn on so as to attract the preoccupied eyes of people far away. Then the bridges count themselves to the west. First bridge, second bridge, third bridge. Street cars, auto lights and vague noises jerk eerily over the bridges.